Word: feydeau
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...adapting Feydeau, any translator has to take certain liberties. What Shapiro has done is to take liberties equal in inventiveness to the devices he is trying to translate: take, for instance. Miss Betting, the governess whom Feydeau uses to mock the garrulous Madamae Duverger. In the original. Miss Betting is English, unable to understand a word of Madame Duverger's rapid fire French. In this translation, she becomes a deafmute, capable of speaking only in sign language. The comic intent is preserved, even heightened, although the device itself is altered...
...feeling of theatre being done for some intangible reason, for something other than Actors' Equity scale plus fringes, covers a multitude of sins. The small theatre limits provide intimacy at the expense of narrowing the scope of the production. Still, the American premiere of a new version of Feydeau could have happened in worse places than a sturdy old New England barn...
...Feydeau's farces depend on so many devices, visual tricks, wordplays, multiple entrances and exits, that only a well-disciplined company can hope to make sense (or nonsense) of them. The High Tor Company does remarkably well at meeting the requirements of Feydeau. Jeffrey Peters as Bois-D'Enghien, the protagonist who loves too wisely and too much, carries himself like a sophisticated Groucho Marx. Rocco Piccolomini as the General is a fine old fashioned zany with a phony moustache and a phony accent to match, both of which contribute immeasurably to his persona, as he and the posturing poetaster...
...protestations to the contrary, Georges Feydeau must have been at least mildly amused by the utter madness of his literary conceits. The words "Feydeau" and farce are so tightly entangled with each other that they are close to interchangeable. The brilliant implausibility of his plots and the sheer bravado of his artifice are so stunning that even their author could not have been somewhat affected by them. Whatever Hollywood, and the entire Twentieth Century for that matter, have done in the way of farce is largely traceable to the influence of this archpriest of the genre...
...Feydeau has not had the popularity he deserves among American audiences, it is largely because he is almost untranslatable. He is so uniquely French that he defies transferral into a less poetic language. Four Farces by Georges Feydeau, translated by Norman Shapiro, was a National Book Award finalist last year thanks to Shapiro's facility in rising to the challenge of Feydeau, and this production shows that Shapiro's translation makes a good acting text as well as a good reading version...